Population of Mexico Doubled in 28 Years

The population of Mexico doubled in the past 28 years, making it the 11th most populous nation on the globe and adding to pressures on the land, economy and environment in the United States’ southern neighbor, according to census figures released this week.

Armed with the new 1995 data showing that almost half of Mexico’s 91.1 million people now live in overcrowded cities and that the population nationwide will continue to grow an average of 1.8% each year through the end of this century, analysts said Friday that the numbers represent the biggest obstacle as Mexico attempts to join the developed nations of the First World.

The growth rate alone “means that the population will double [again] in 40 years,” said Luis Manuel Guerra, director of a private environmental consulting firm in Mexico City. “That’s terrible, because the vast majority of those who will be born will want high energy use and increased urban space.

“The vast majority of the next 90 million also will be poor. They will be undereducated, and the importance they will give to the environment will be minimal. The prognosis both for the environment and conservation of energy is very dim.”

The impact of the new data on jobs and the economy is not much brighter, analysts agreed.

At a time when President Ernesto Zedillo’s government already is struggling to produce the 5% annual economic growth needed to create new jobs for the 1 million Mexicans entering the work force each year, the statistics are particularly unsettling, they said.

“Any economist can tell you that a stable economy and sustainable use of resources require a stable population,” Guerra added.

Even top officials of Mexico’s National Institute of Geography, Information and Statistics, which released the preliminary 1995 census data, conceded that the numbers show the nation’s population is anything but stable.

“Since 1990, Mexico has grown by 10 million people--the entire population of countries like Guatemala and Portugal,” institute President Carlos Jarque said in an interview. “It originally took years to have just 10 million. Then, in the first 50 years of this century, Mexico grew by another 10 million. And now it takes just five years. That’s a significant change.”

Among other significant changes, Jarque said, is a clear trend of people chasing jobs.

The population grew at a rate of 6.46%, for example, in Quintana Roo state, where Cancun’s tourism industry has created a boom economy. Baja California, home to dozens of labor-intensive border industries, grew by an astonishing 4.29%.

By contrast, in the nation’s capital--already considered the world’s largest metropolitan area, with more than 21 million residents recorded last year--the population grew by just half a percent.

“In Mexico, we experience a double phenomenon,” Jarque said, noting the extremes of growth. “The population is concentrated in three urban areas: Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey. One of every four Mexicans lives in these cities, which take up just 2% of the national territory. At the other extreme, one of every four Mexicans lives in a town of fewer than 2,500 inhabitants.

“Now, we have a situation where Mexico is urbanizing, with the greatest growth in the medium-sized cities.”

Environmentalist Guerra called that trend “disturbing.”

The urban growth, he said, “will put enormous strains on the overcrowded megalopolis. This will compound problems of transportation and jobs--problems which the government will try to solve with little concern for sustainability.”

For other independent analysts, the data and their overall economic implications also bode ill for migration. With more people and fewer jobs in Mexico’s future, the analysts say, an increase in legal and illegal immigration to the United States is almost inevitable.

“If other factors don’t change, there will be growth in the overall number of immigrants,” said Sergio Zendejas, professor of rural studies and migration at the University of Michoacan. Michoacan is one of the two Mexican states from which the greatest number of illegal migrants to the U.S. emigrate.